- What have you heard about Tesla?
That he invented alternating current (AC)
and electrified our world.
That he and Edison have the "War of the Currents"
between AC and DC.
That Edison hounded Tesla for the rest of his life.
That he wanted to give everyone free electricity
That he was a physics genius.
That's what I heard on YouTube, and websites,
and even TV shows and video games.
But I researched it by reading primary materials,
and ready to have you're mind blown?
They're all wrong. All of them.
Ready to learn the real story?
Let's go.
♪ Electricity electricity ♪
What are the facts commonly told about Tesla?
Tesla invented AC and created our electrical world.
AC was invented and utilized way before Tesla.
In fact, the first AC generator was invented in 1832
when a french tinkerer named Hippolytle Pixii
created a machine that spun a magnet near coils of wire.
Pixii was inspired by Michael Faraday's paper
from the previous year
that stated that changing a magnetic field
will induce a current in a coil.
In Pixii's machine,
as the magnet spun towards and away from the coil,
it created alternating current, or AC.
Pixii however, used brushes to force the current
to always go in one directional, or DC.
Over the years, the generators got more complicated,
and according to a 19th century electricity book,
in 1856, after frustration with some faulty brushes,
a large generator was used without brushes,
and it was found that electric lights could be lit
with alternating current.
Tesla was born that very year,
so it seems very unlikely
that he had anything to do with it.
For many years afterward, AC was often used to power
bright outdoor arc lamp.
Although, Dyanmos with post DC
were considered better for the incandescent lamp.
The big change in electricity came in the 1880s
with transformers.
Transformers could transform AC current
into high voltage, low current waves
that could travel long distances
without losing much energy to heat,
and then transform back to low voltage, high current
to be used in the home.
A trio of Hungarian engineers, whose initials are ZBD,
patented what is now called the ZBD transformer in 1885.
George Westinghouse became convinced
that AC was the future for incandescent lights
after reading about the transformer.
Westinghouse's assistant, William Stanley,
patented a simpler and more useful transformer in 1886.
That same year, Westinghouse and Stanley created the
"first practical system for providing electrical
illumination using alternating current with transformers."
Now, we finally get to Nikola Tesla, sort of.
See one the biggest handicaps to the AC system,
is they didn't have a way to make a true AC motor.
How do you get something to spin in a circle,
when the current goes back and forth.
In 1885, an Italian names Galileo Ferraris
solved this problem by building an AC generator
with two separate coils, which produced two separate
AC currents at different peak times.
Ferraris found that these two AC currents
could push a cylinder in a circle.
This was the first true polyphase, or multiple phase,
AC current and motor.
However, the motor didn't work efficiently at all,
and he didn't publish his findings until 1888.
Meanwhile, independent of Ferraris,
Tesla had a similar idea,
but with a more powerful and practical motor,
which he patented in 1887.
Although polyphase AC was eventually appreciated
for its efficiently, which is why we now use
three phase current.
At the time, people were mostly interested in the motor.
In 1888, George Westinghouse bought Tesla's patent,
because according to Westinghouse,
his company needed to control
the alternating motor business.
Although there's much debate,
about whether Tesla first invented polyphase current,
or if Ferraris did.
At the time, Tesla admitted that they had the same idea.
"Professor Ferraris not only came independently
to the same theoretical results,
but in a manner identical almost to the smallest detail."
So wait, if Tesla didn't invent AC,
and didn't independently invent AC polyphase current,
and Westinghouse was already implementing AC
for his lighting systems
two years before he got Tesla's patent,
why was the war of the currents between Edison and Tesla?
That brings us to fact number two.
The war of the currents was a battle over AC vs DC
between Edison and Tesla.
Edison's real rival was Westinghouse,
and Tesla was just a minor player.
In 1880, Thomas Edison got a patent for the light bulb,
and was having great success with his company,
Edison General Electric,
which used Dynamos ad post-DC current.
In 1886, George Westinghouse started using AC
and transformers to light up buildings.
Edison hated Westinghouse and AC,
because he thought the high voltage
alternating current was dangerous.
Writing a private note that, "Just as certain as death,
Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months."
Edison then wrote a public manifesto about the dangers of AC
where he mentioned Westinghouse 24 times and Tesla zero.
Edison then let a man named Harold Brown
use his space to conduct gruesome public experiments
killing dogs and horses with AC,
to promote how dangerous it was.
As well as promoting the use of AC in the electric chair.
Edison even wanted death by electric chair
to be known as Westinghouse.
And AC did become cheaper and more powerful in 1888,
when Westinghouse bought Tesla's patent
for a polyphase generator and motor,
but it wasn't a pivotal moment in the war.
What was pivotal was when J. P. Morgan,
who was a major stockholder of the Edison company,
got sick of all the money wasted in lawsuits,
and wanted to use the cheaper and more powerful AC.
So in 1892, he orchestrated a coup,
fired Edison from his own company,
and even removed Edison's name from it,
leaving plain old GE, or General Electric.
However, an Edison vs Westinghouse rivalry
doesn't fit the narrative of a corporate Goliath
versus the individual brilliant David.
So, it's been remade into a rivalry
between Edison and Tesla,
where Westinghouse is just erased from history.
So if Edison didn't battle Tesla in the war over AC and DC,
why did he harass him and thwart all of his efforts?
This brings us to fact number three.
Edison hounded Tesla, starting when Tesla worked for Edison.
Not true according to Tesla.
It's true that Tesla did work for Edison
briefly in 1884, and according to his biography,
when Tesla worked for the New York branch
of the Edison company,
the local manager offered him 50,000 dollars
if he completed a task,
but then said it was a joke and Tesla resigned in protest.
This local manager was not Edison,
but it was changed into Edison
as the origin story of their rivalry.
On the previous page,
Tesla wrote how honored he was to meet Edison.
He wrote that Edison was a, "wonderful man who,
without early advantages and scientific training,
had accomplished so much."
It made him wonder if his formal education meant that,
"most of my life had been squandered."
He wrote his nice words about Edison
in the same book where he described the people
who thwarted his efforts
to build an all Earth transmission tower,
as, "nothing more than the microbes of a nasty disease."
So it doesn't sound like Tesla felt
like Edison was responsible for his hardship,
although he was clearly distressed
about the loss of his tower.
Why was Tesla's tower destroyed?
This leads us to the next fact about him.
Tesla wanted to create free electricity
and was stopped by money hungry corporations.
Tesla never had anything to do with free electricity
and he was stopped because his methods didn't work,
and Marconi's did.
See, in 1891, he invented the Tesla coil
and took the world by storm
with his amazing demonstrations
of lighting bulbs with one line,
then lighting fluorescents in his bare hand.
Tesla became convinced that he could use his machine
to electrify the whole Earth,
so that he could input energy in one spot,
and remove it anywhere else in the world.
This was a different was to transmit energy,
through the Earth instead of through wire,
but he never said anything about free energy
or energy from nothing.
It was supposed to be cheaper
because the copper in the wires was so expensive,
not because Tesla was tapping
into some mystical source of Mayan energy
the government doesn't want you to know about.
In 1901, Tesla convince J. P. Morgan,
the same guy who screwed over Edison nine years earlier,
to give him 150,000 dollars
so he could build his all Earth transmission tower.
Meanwhile, the inventions in the Tesla coil
were quite useful for sending long distance
wireless telegraph signals.
In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi said he got a wireless telegraph
to go across the Atlantic.
Tesla was unconcerned, as he was doing much grander work,
electrifying the Earth.
And also, he knew that Marconi was using several
of his patents.
However, in 1904, Marconi got the patent office
to reverse its decision, and awarded Marconi
the rights to his transmitter and receiver.
Around that time, J. P. Morgan became irritated with Tesla,
his money pit of a tower, and stopped funding him.
Tesla failed to get other people to fund him,
because more and more people started to notice
that his ideas were, well, nonsense.
To quote from an article from 1903,
Tesla's, "lectures abounded in fallacies and absurdities,
but that spectacular sensationalism was accepted
as a substitute for scientific method,"
which brings us to fact number five.
Tesla was a physics genius.
This was the most surprising to me.
Tesla was an electrical genius with great intuition
on how to build amazing electrical devices,
however, his physics was bad,
like demonstrably horrible.
He didn't believe in electrons.
He thought relativity was pseudoscience.
And astonishingly, considering his interest and influence
on wireless, he never believed that Hertz's radio
was electromagnetic vibrations in the air.
The best way to demonstrate Tesla's tortured relationship
with physics is an article he wrote in 1900.
This article contains some iconic pictures,
but in 36 pages, only include one equation,
1/2 m v squared,
where the velocity v is a certain hypothetical velocity,
which we are unable exactly to define and determine.
And m is the mass of mankind, that can be increased by,
"the promotion of marriage, by conscientious attention
to the children, and by the observance of all the precepts
and laws of religion and hygiene.
See what I mean?
This article wasn't written at the end of his life,
when he was in love with a pigeon, don't ask.
This was written at the height of his powers,
and was actually the article
that convinced J. P. Morgan to give him the money
to fund the tower in the first place.
Conclusion.
When I started to research the history of electricity,
I expected Tesla to be a major part of it.
His devices are so beautiful, and far and away,
his name seems to be the most closely connected
to the word electricity.
However, I found most of my knowledge
came from a complete misunderstanding of his life and ideas.
Nonetheless, we shouldn't discount
that Tesla was a wizard of electricity,
and his devices are still, over a hundred years later,
things of beauty and wonder.
Tesla's devices are a gateway drug
for many electrical engineers,
and that is not a small thing.
♪ Electricity electricity ♪
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